When prepping to film Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance, directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor put themselves through a hellacious fact-finding mission. The daredevil directors tried out nearly every 3-D camera rig on the market, at one point becoming convinced they would need to build custom hardware, bolt by bolt, to capture the type of comic-book action they envisioned.

“We were under the impression,” Taylor told Wired, “as many people are, that [shooting in 3-D] was inherently superior to post-converting.” But after their tests, they compared what they could do with 3-D cameras to what could be accomplished with computers — and the machines won.

“Now that the software guys are getting to the point where they can do incredible work with anything you shoot, then why wouldn’t you just free up filmmakers to shoot the movie they want to?” said Taylor, whose PG-13 Ghost Rider sequel opens Friday. “The hardware guys and the software guys are sort of in a race — it’s like an arms race for 3-D.”

These days, every director working on a 3-D film must face the inevitable question of whether to shoot stereoscopically or convert in post-production. While conventional wisdom holds that filming in native 3-D produces better results, ongoing technological advances are making directors give conversion serious consideration.

Neveldine/Taylor remain unequivocal about which faction is winning the war. (“Whenever there’s a race between hardware and software, software always wins,” Taylor said.) But bringing directors around hasn’t been easy. Conversion got a bad name after critics panned Clash of the Titans‘ hurried 3-D upgrade, but with more successful conversions in films like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger, the stigma is subsiding.

Converting to 3-D Saves Time and Headaches on Set

Proponents of post-conversion point out that turning everything 3-D after the fact makes the filming process easier because directors don’t need to worry about getting a shot perfect while on set — or about wasting actors’ valuable time while complicated 3-D shots are set up. It’s certainly something Neveldine and Taylor benefited from while working on the Ghost Rider sequel. The pair knew early on that they wanted a stereoscopic movie, but they also knew they couldn’t film the way they do — on rollerblades, off the side of cliffs — with giant 3-D rigs.

“In the case of fire and smoke, it’s far superior to render it in native stereo [but] the way those boys film is not conducive to shooting native.”

To make sure their 3-D was badass instead of half-assed, they got their conversion partner — Canadian company Gener8, which has developed its own conversion software called Stereo Composer — on board early. They used a bread-box-size device called a Civetta (Italian for “owl” — the name comes from its shape) to take 3-D images of each set so the conversion team would have all the parameters needed to make each shot have all the mathematically proper dimensions. That forethought helped the filmmakers easily incorporate the flaming-skull effects they got from VFX partner Iloura.

“In the case of fire and smoke, it’s far superior to render it in native stereo [but] the way those boys film is not conducive to shooting native,” Gener8 stereo producer Paul Becker said in an interview with Wired. “So to get a 3-D film with the cool volume of fire and smoke and to shoot the way Neveldine and Taylor shoot, was to shoot in 2-D, which everyone knows how to do, and then convert, which we know how to do — well, I might add.”

Post-converting to 3-D also gave the Ghost Rider directors more bang for their buck. Whereas films like The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and its sequel have a reported combined budget north of $500 million and Michael Bay’s 3-D Tranformers: Dark of the Moon had an estimated budget of $195 million, Taylor said he would’ve been “happy to have” the $75 million budget it was reported Spirit of Vengeance received. (He declined to provide the film’s actual price tag.)

Making 3-D Rigs With a 2-D Feel

Even as film-conversion companies hustle to improve their software, the makers of 3-D camera rigs — structures that hold the dual cameras necessary to capture a stereo image — are devising ways to make their gear cheaper, smaller, lighter and more like regular camera set-ups. The goal is to make shooting native 3-D as inexpensive and easy for directors as employing a room full of nerds at a conversion shop.

Vince Pace, who started the venture with Avatar director James Cameron, told Wired he expects the 5-D rig to be as affordable and as easy to use as 2-D filming gear, potentially allowing directors like Neveldine and Taylor to shoot in any style they wish within tight time and budget constraints.

“At some point it won’t require a rig to make good 3-D images, and those are technologies that we’re working on today and are actually very far along with.”

This type of smaller setup would solve several problems for directors, Pace said, and could be conducive to nearly any type of shooting environment while taking no longer than traditional 2-D filming methods.

“You can’t come in with a refrigerator and say it’s the same thing as a microwave oven,” he said. “There’s also a time factor — it can’t cost production more time to do a shot.”

Other rig-makers are also cooking up solutions. For example, Burbank-based 3ality Technica, whose gear is currently being used by Peter Jackson to film The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey and was used by Ridley Scott for Prometheus, has been updating its products to meet directors’ needs.

“They’d like no rigs at all, and ultimately that’s the future,” 3ality CEO Steve Schklair told Wired. “At some point it won’t require a rig to make good 3-D images, and those are technologies that we’re working on today and are actually very far along with.”

Schklair won’t elaborate on exactly what his company is working on, but he said any director currently shooting in 2-D and hoping for magic during the conversion process won’t get what he wants. The simple reason? When a movie is filmed in 2-D, directors can’t look at a 3-D monitor displaying the final product during shooting.

Even Films Shot in 3-D Need Conversion

While dual cameras and a stereoscopic rig might produce a better image, at least as seen by the trained eye, even films shot in native 3-D nearly always rely on some post-production conversion. Transformers: Dark of the Moon, for example, needed conversion to fix broken shots. (If a shot doesn’t come out right, filmmakers often take footage from just one of the cameras and digitally convert it to 3-D after the fact.) Even Avatarreportedly needed post-filming triage.

As conversion techniques become more sophisticated and get incorporated into films that are acquired in 3-D, we should see a trend toward a “hybrid approach,” said Charlotte Jones, a cinema analyst for IHS Screen Digest. Ultimately, the source of the 3-D will no longer be the primary consideration for the film’s visual quality.

“The key is whether a film is a dedicated 3-D vehicle, essentially one that has been conceived, designed and executed well in 3-D, rather than converted purely as an afterthought,” Jones said in an e-mail to Wired.

For older movies to be seen in 3-D, they must be converted because there are no other options. Even 3ality’s Schklair concedes in certain cases he’s not a native-3-D purist.

“You can’t remake Star Wars because Harrison Ford is too old. So you have to convert movies like that.”

Schklair wasn’t directly referencing last week’s 3-D rerelease of The Phantom Menace, but the point remains the same. Some fans groaned at the prospect of 3-D-ifying the film, but it brought in $22.5 million when it opened last weekend. For Prime Focus, the firm that converted 2,200 shots for the first Star Wars 3-D film, Phantom Menace is a calling card for what can be done with a movie that — unlike Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance or even Thor — wasn’t initially intended to be seen stereoscopically.

“In a world that is dominated by franchise movies and big tent-poles, your biggest challenge is how to outdo your own work from the previous one,” Prime Focus CEO and founder Namit Malhotra told Wired. “You have to constantly have talent and technology at your hands that helps you push the envelope.”

A Matter of Style

More than anything, filmmakers say the decision to shoot in 3-D or convert in post-production often boils down to taste and knowing what’s right for the film.

“We’re still kind of punk-rock filmmakers,” Ghost Rider‘s Taylor said. “We can’t have our sets look like the control room at NASA.”

Ultimately, he’d like to see a truce between native 3-D purists and converts to post-production conversion.

“I think they’re both useful tools and, if they’re both done correctly, can work well together in the same film,” Bennison said. “And that should be the conversation we’re having: When to use one tool versus the other, not which is better and why conversion is always worse, because I contend it doesn’t have to be.”